


Twelve Days of Mad Science

by sevenofspade



Category: X-Club (Comics)
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 22:37:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2790212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenofspade/pseuds/sevenofspade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prank wars at the Office of Pure Empirical Science!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twelve Days of Mad Science

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VanaTuivana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VanaTuivana/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. I tried to fit as many of your prompts and likes into this that I could.
> 
> Timeline wise, this is set some time after X-Club, but before Cable and X-Force. Aside from that, I've drawn from various runs for background details. This fic fits in the greater Marvel timeline via handwaving though, because lol comics timelines.
> 
> I've tried to make the science be as realistic as possible, even by the standards of real world science, but I resorted to comics science in places.

The light was far too bright when Kavita Rao woke up and her flesh felt weird, like her bones didn't fit inside her skin. Her centre of gravity was wrong and when she stumbled -- why was she standing? -- and caught herself on the wall, her skin was far too pale.

She straightened up, held out her hand and looked at the outline of bones, at haplogroups and the C/T single nucleotide polymorphism on the first non-coding region of the twenty-second chromosome.

"I'm going to kill him," she said with Nemesis' voice.

"Kill who?" Jeffries asked.

She tugged on the sleeves of her -- his -- lab coat and tried not to fall on her face. She felt like she was about to trip at any moment, but she thanked evolution that the human species was not as sexually dysmorphic as some others were.

"Do you know where Nemesis is? We seem to have exchanged consciousnesses," Kavita said.

It probably said a lot about her life that Jeffries took this entirely in stride as he asked the computer to locate her body and/or Nemesis' thought patterns -- they might not have been the ones affected, but somehow she doubted that. She knew Nemesis wanted to, as the saying went, "get into her pants", but she didn't know he would take it that literally.

She shoved a hand in her pocket angrily and was greeted by a _ew gross what is that_. She took the hand out of the pocket. The telepathic starfish waved at her.

_Oh joy._

She put it back into the pocket. She didn't want to know.

"You! You over-ambitious jealously deranged Petri Girl! Give me my body back!" And there was Nemesis, still wearing her pyjamas with the Gosling and Franklin’s Photo 51 on them and stomping like an elephant. She winced at that; she had fragile ankles.

He shoved a finger in her face and she pushed it away.

"Jealous, Nemesis? I don't think so. You did this; you're going to fix it. And keep your hands strictly away from my body," she added. He might be occupying it, but it was still her body.

"Your hands are attached to your body!" Nemesis said, throwing up said hands.

Well, at least, he'd stopped pretending he hadn't been the one to do it. That didn't make looking at his expressions on her face -- had she known her eyebrows could do that? -- any less disquieting.

"Fix this," she repeated, pointing a finger at him -- that certainly led credence to her theory that there was such a thing as a "drama gene" and that Nemesis' was over-expressed.

"Urgh, fine," he said, reaching up to pull his hat further down his head. When he found no hat, he settled for fisting his hands in her hair and tugging.

Over-expressed drama gene and the force of habit, then.

Nemesis worked all day and all night -- he was _clearly_ stalling. Even if, as he claimed -- and he took any and all opportunities to make that claim --, he was not responsible, it shouldn't have taken more than a day.

While Nemesis worked, Kavita worked on her own project. She was never going to have such unrestricted access to Nemesis' genome again. The man was a buffoon, but his genes, including -- or perhaps especially -- the self-evolved ones, were a thing of beauty.

But genes were her thing and she'd done much more complicated with them than what she was planning. This was easy, really. All she had to do was suppress the expression of one specific gene and everything else would fall in place.

The trick being how long it would take for the gene therapy to assimilate and be completed -- that was always the problem. Of course, this being Nemesis they were talking about, there was the added problem of finding a retrovirus that would work as a carrier.

In the end, she decided to forgo the retrovirus entirely and simply modify cells by hand. She only needed to do a few of them, and then PCR and Nemesis' own cells would propagate the mutation for her. The man's habit of self-evolving must have started with accelerating his response time to gene therapy; he was not a patient man, but for once that worked in her favour.

She finished before he did.

"Are you done yet?"

"No!"

 _Much_ before he did.

"Gene monkey! Wake up!"

"Are you done?" She pulled a face at him, even though Nemesis seemed to wake up a lot easier than she did -- probably he would have self-evolved out of the need to eat if he could.

"Yes. Behold!" He presented her dramatically with -- well, she had no idea what it was.

She raised an eyebrow at him.

He waggled the whatever-it-was in her face. "Behold!"

"I _am_ beholding," she said. "What is it and what are its side-effects?"

"There are no side-effects, madam," Nemesis said, which Kavita took to mean there were and he was sulking about it. "And this device will reverse this most fortunate incident."

'Fortunate'. That was it. She was doing the thing. She uncapped the needle behind her back and injected herself with the modified cells.

Enjoy your new biology, James.

Nemesis pressed the big red button on top of the whatever-it-was and the world went white.

Kavita's ankles hurt, but at least they were her ankles. She stood up. "If you'll excuse me, I've got sleep to catch up on."

She left the room without looking back. When she'd told Jeffries her plan, he'd assured her he would be taping Nemesis' reaction. She asked Danger to make sure now got into her room -- unless the fate of the world was in the balance, because this was now in the realm of possibilities for her life -- and changed the combination to her door anyway.

She saw neither hair nor hide of Nemesis until diner the next day. Well. Diner was a big word for fish burgers with Jeffries on the pier.

"So what'd you think of the new grill, K?" Jeffries flipped one of the fish steaks on said grill.

"It hasn't exploded or tried to kill us yet, so it's already doing better than the last one. Is this what you've been working on for the last week?" Kavita asked.

"Very funny and no, this is just a side project," Jeffries said. "Are you done with the bread?"

"Yes." Kavita held out the open first bun. "What have you been working on?"

Jeffries never got a chance to answer, because a bloodcurdling scream echoed throughout the compound.

"Ah. I think Nemesis found out about the little surprise I left him," Kavita said.

"Indeed. She is most displeased," Danger confirmed -- and where had she come from?

"She?" Jeffries asked, then it seemed to dawn on him. "Damn, K, you don't do things by half."

"Someone pranks me, I prank back," Kavita said. She'd had six siblings growing up, so it was a lesson she'd learned early. "And, Danger, I'm pretty sure James is still a 'he', biology notwithstanding."

Danger's head dipped until her chin touched her chest; it was an affectation she'd picked up recently to let organics know when she was putting this current body on stand-by. It was an improvement from before, but Kavita still thought it was a bit creepy.

Danger raised her head again. "He wishes me to inform me that this means war. I advise you to refrain from escalating this situation any further."

"You tell him if he has anything to say, he can say it to my face." Kavita spread curry on her burger bun. She'd been looking forward to this all day and she was not going to let His Annoyingness keep her from enjoying this moment.

Her action reminded Jeffries that he hadn't turned off the grill and he rushed to it. Once, he'd done so and waved away the smoke, he offered one of the fish steaks to her.

It was burnt, but not enough for her to feel the nausea she felt at the idea of eating it. With a start, she realised she hadn't eaten fish since Lida's death.

She shook her head at Jeffries and ate her curry sandwich; she'd eaten much worse as a student.

There was a sound like Ilyana opening a portal to the folded string space she called the Limbo dimension and suddenly Kavita was under an inch tall.

Oh the little coccobacillus.

She was going to end him.

"K?" Jeffries said and Kavita put her hands on her ears in an attempt to protect her eardrums.

It was a pointless gesture. She dropped her hands. Her eardrums were fine, which meant that they still had the resistance of the ones of her normal-sized self, which meant that Nemesis had used Pym particles and that she might be ant-sized, but she still had the strength she usually had -- that was how Ant-Man worked, after all. At least Nemesis hadn't sent her to the Microverse.

Kavita stomped her foot. She knew Jeffries knew Morse code; he was the one who'd taught her.

Far above, Nemesis laughed like the supervillain he kept insisting he wasn't. "Vengeance is mine!"

"I don't want to get involved in this prank war of yours -- some of us have real work to do." Jeffries picked her up. Kavita grabbed his thumb for balance as he continued, "But, James, you gotta fix her. She's not a mutate."

Jeffries was right. Kavita didn't have the X-gene, not the two alleles that would make the recessive gene express itself by making her a mutant and not even one allele that would allow her to survive incredible odds with unlikely powers as a result.

Kavita was human, through and through, with not a drop of mutant blood in her. And now she was starting to sound like Magneto, and that was never a good sign.

"Of _course_ Petri Girl's not a mutate," Nemesis mumbled. But he had the good grace to look contrite as he added, "The Pym particles should wear off within the hour. Just don't drop her, Jeff."

"I shall take care of Doctor Rao," Danger said. She brought her hand close to Jeffries' and Kavita stepped onto it.

She trusted Danger not to drop her, even if she returned to full-size all at once instead of gradually. Jeffries was only just out of the sling he'd had to wear for three weeks after the incident with the Ultra Gravitationer had pulled his arm out of its socket.

"Code Monkey," Nemesis said. "You will assist me in restoring my body to its masculine perfection."

"Would if I could, but I'm an engineer, not a miracle worker. I can't restore what wasn't," Jeffries said.

Kavita flashed him a tiny thumbs-up. She didn't know if he saw her, but Nemesis certainly did.

He leaned forward -- and he was going to keep that body more than a day, someone would have to tell him not to this with the kind of shirt he was wearing. Kavita voted for Ilyana; it was her shirt, after all.

Once he was, more or less, level with her, Nemesis said, pointing a finger that was twice her size at her, "This doesn't mean this is over."

"It's not over until you apologise," Kavita said. Was she actually becoming bigger, or did she just feel bigger?

"You started it!"

So Nemesis was back to pretending he hadn't gotten into her PJs, then. Kavita frowned at him. "How about self-evolving some maturity?"

Nemesis flapped his hands at Danger and her, then stalked off.

"Idie has a house you can inhabit for the night," Danger told Kavita.

"Thanks, but I wouldn't want to break her toy secret base," Kavita replied. "Can you put me down on my bed? I should wake up normal-sized."

Kavita did not wake up normal-sized.

She was trapped just below a meter and suddenly felt a closer kinship to Gregor Samsa than she would ever have liked. Although, hopefully, her situation was only temporary and not some Kafka-esque tragedy.

She took her phone from her pocket and dialled Ilyana. Kavita had always stood on the side-lines, but even she had heard about Ilyana's reputation as a prank master. Mostly because it said so on her business cards, right under "Sorceress from a hell dimension" -- they'd been a gift, Ilyana had said. Kavita hadn't argued and had pocketed the card, saying she would call if she needed help. They'd both thought it would apply to the first item, but apparently not. (And Ilyana had been _very_ clear that the help Kavita would need had better not involve Ilyana's transportation capabilities.)

"I'm busy," Ilyana said and hang up.

Kavita rang back. If Ilyana was really busy, she wouldn't have picked up at all. Besides, the dial-tone was tasting orange and gold in the back of Kavita's throat -- it struck her as a bit odd for Nemesis to prank her while she was still suffering from the last one, even if he had seemed convinced it would have worn off by now.

And synaesthesia seemed an awfully poetic thing for Nemesis to be inflicting on her. Was he trying to apologise, in his way?

Kavita explained the situation to Ilyana. When Ilyana was finished laughing, she suggested Kavita drop Nemesis into a pocket dimension.

"He's no angel," Kavita said, "but Limbo seems a bit -- I've an idea. I'll call you back."

Kavita sat up on the edge of the bed and her feet touched the ground. Good. Being normal-sized again -- or close enough, knowing the half-life of Pym particles in non-mutates -- would make her next prank easier.

Because of course she was retaliating, poetry in the shape of an apology or not.

She didn't see Jeffries or Nemesis the whole day and when she looked at her gene sequences, they danced like colours from beyond the rainbow. She'd never considered what yellow-ish purple would look like before. Now she knew.

The smell of lunch that day was like music to her ears and the sunshine of the late afternoon tasted like orange juice.

The synaesthesia stopped fluctuating sometime around midnight. It had faded by dawn the next day. Kavita had breakfast when she was done playing gene DJ. Given the time, it was more of a brunch, but she would take it.

She sighed. Now she just had to deliver the payload into Nemesis' system somehow. Could she aerosolise it and ask Danger to vent it into his room? No. The risk of collateral damage was small, but not negligible.

Jeffries wouldn't help and Ilyana was busy. Would Erik help? He didn't seem the type, but he did loathe Nemesis' arrogance. If she spun this just right, he just might help.

She prepared her speech as she created the dart.

Erik rejected her proposal, but Rogue asked if the dart would fit in a 1963 Dragunov. A type of rifle, she'd explained at Kavita's look.

Kavita had handed over the dart and Rogue had nodded.

"I might as well use Nat's sniper skills while I still have them," Rogue said.

Kavita wondered when the Black Widow had become 'Nat' to Rogue and decided not to ask.

So Rogue shot Nemesis and nothing happened for several moments. Kavita was starting to doubt that using Terrigen-242 to boost the gene splicing had been a good idea -- it had wreaked havoc on the stability of the non-coding sequences -- possibly the retrovirus had been rendered inert by them -- and Rogue was growing impatient when the back of Nemesis' lab coat split open to reveal the wings of a hummingbird, blown up to fifty times their original size.

"Petri Girl!"

"And now you run," Rogue said as she got up and finished dismantling the weapon.

"And now I run," Kavita agreed.

So she did.

Nemesis caught up with her in the lab; he'd adapted far faster than she expected to the shifting of his centre of gravity and his newly honey-combed bones -- he could fly, if he wanted and figured out how.

She suddenly hoped he did fly and pulled an Icarus. At the same time, she regretted not using the treatment on herself -- how would it feel to fly by her own power?

"No pranking in the lab," she said. It would lead to no end of trouble. In fact, it had and that was why that was the one rule they'd all agreed to obey.

(Honestly? It wasn't that Kavita didn't like or respect Victor von Doom -- some of his work on cloning was a thing of beauty and he was a fair lab partner -- but she always felt uncomfortable in the presence of people who had their own countries.)

"You have to fix this," Nemesis said, gesturing at the wings on his back. The wings snapped open and close a couple of times -- apparently the drama gene had been integrated with the new parts of his genome.

She smiled. "It should wear off within the hour."

"They had better," he said.

"But then you won't be warning everyone about your attention span," Kavita replied.

"Lies. My attention span is at least the life span of a hummingbird." Nemesis tried crossing his arms, but his wings got in the way. Still no finesse in the motor control, then. If Kavita ever did something like this again, she'd have to pay attention to that.

Kavita picked up the latest issue of _Nature Genetics_ and made of show of reading it and ignoring Nemesis. Nemesis did not take kindly to being ignored, but soon Kavita was reading the journal in truth –- there was an article on robotnikinin as a potential inhibitor of the Sonic Hedgehog signalling pathway.

"It has been two hours," Nemesis said.

"You're still not a real boy," Kavita said distractedly.

"I'm a real boy with wings," Nemesis said. "They do not belong and I want them off."

"De-evolve them yourself."

Nemesis sighed and sat on a chair as best as he could with the wings on his back -- hunched over with his elbows on his knees. "It's not how that works."

"No?" Kavita closed the journal. The article had just taken a turn for the downright bizarre -- robotnikinin had completely disappeared, in favour of eggmanin.

"No. I self-evolve, but once I'm evolved, I usually stay evolved and by usually, I mean 'unless I rip out the offending genes myself'," Nemesis said, looking at the floor. "You've done your job too well or not well enough. The bonding effect of the Terrigen Mists means I can't undo it without ripping my genome apart. The world should not be deprived of my intellect."

"And what a loss that would be for the world," Kavita said. But she'd heard the compliment and the fear hidden under the bravado. "Left cupboard, third shelf."

Nemesis got up, found the baseline sample of his genetic code she'd made before she started modifying it -- the back-up copy -- and injected it directly into himself, without prepping the sample.

Kavita winced. Who did that?

The wings started to wilt and moult and Nemesis pulled a face behind his mask as he examined one of the feathers. "I'm losing body mass!"

"Eat more," Kavita advised. Back home, Meena -- her grandfather's second wife -- had believed that was the answer to everything. This time, she would have been right.

Nemesis waited until the wings were all gone and marched -- with stomping like that, it couldn't rightly be called walking -- his way to the cafeteria.

Kavita did not follow.

She picked up the journal again and returned to reading her article.

She was surrounded by Roman legionnaires. Given that she didn't remember falling asleep -- much less waking up --, she was fairly confident that she wasn't dreaming.

Temporal displacement, then. It wasn't James, because he would never have picked Hadrian's Wall as her destination and because he was far too aware of the risk of accidentally pulling a _The Man in the High Castle_ on reality.

Kavita stood up and held out her hands, palms open. All the Latin she knew was from her science studies and none of the legionnaires looked like they knew anything about adenoviridae.

"You will release us immediately," Nemesis was saying, somewhere far enough away that it sounded like he was talking instead of shouting.

Soon, he was standing next to Kavita, mirroring her pose. The Romans didn't worried or threatening, just confused.

"I think we're north of the Wall," Kavita said.

"Nice deduction, Petri Girl. Is it the marvellous English weather we're having that clued you in?" Nemesis asked.

"Scottish," Kavita said. "If we're north of the Wall, we're in Scotland, not England." Her cousin Pradeep had been adamant that these were not the same thing, especially when it came to rugby. He owned a fish 'n' chips shop in Edinburg and his daughter studied at King's College, so Kavita figured he would know.

"And no," she added. "It wasn't the weather. They're the Ninth Legion, James."

"I saw that movie," Nemesis said. "We have to go Back To The Future!"

One day, she would figure out how he managed to pronounce capitals. Was there a special gene or was it just part of the standard phenotypes associated with the drama gene?

"How do you suppose we do that?" Kavita really did not want to find out first-hand how the Ninth Legion had disappeared.

"We're scientists, madam," Nemesis said. "Let's science this up!"

"That's not a verb," Kavita replied.

"Excuse you, verbing is perfectly fine and valid English tradition."

"You're German."

Nemesis huffed, crossed his arms and turned away from her. She took that to mean she'd won.

The Romans were talking among themselves.

Kavita kept smiling and looking as non-threatening as she could. Out of the corner of her mouth, she asked Nemesis how the sciencing was going.

"Almost done. I just need a psychic anchor for you," here, Nemesis' speech devolved into an angry mumble where all Kavita could catch was 'telepathy'.

She rolled her eyes at him.

Then waited. And waited. And waited. For a self-proclaimed genius, Nemesis sure could take a long time to get things to work.

"Doctor Richards would be done already," she told him once they'd spent the night sitting on the ground in the middle of the Roman camp.

Nemesis grabbed her hand and she pulled away as the world went white.

They were surrounded by Romans with machine guns when the world came back.

Kavita stopped pulling away from Nemesis out of shock. She'd time travelled before -- once and even more briefly -- but she'd never been in an universe with Romans with machine guns before.

"Petri Girl," Nemesis snarled. "Why did you pull away? Now the when and where are right, but not the how."

Oh no. Kavita was not letting him blame her for his fuck-ups. "Don't just grab people."

He glared at her, like the concept of personal space was alien to him. Maybe he'd self-evolved out of it.

"You brought us," she said, trying to find a word that was to 'how' what 'here' was to 'where' and not finding one, "here. Now take us back."

"Are you going to pull away again if I touch you?" Nemesis asked. "Shut your mouth, you Monty Python reject," he added to one of the Romans.

"Romani ite domum," Kavita added. "And no, James, since you ask."

He took her hand again. It was nice, until he opened his mouth. "If the answer is yes if I ask and no if I don't, so what's the point of asking?"

The world went white.

This time they were in her lab, _Nature Genetics_ still open to the article she had been reading, but the clock on the wall told her it was two days later.

She tried to pick it up -- before the binding was completely destroyed -- but her fingers went right through it and the table beneath. She blinked. She tried again, to the same result.

"You fucked up," she told James and took back her hand.

"I do not 'fuck up', madam," he said, which meant he did, had and was pissed that she'd noticed -- as though she would miss being intangible.

She didn't even bother gratifying that with an answer.

Frankly, she was starting to think that even though she was "just" a geneticist, she could solve this better and faster than Nemesis. She had less ego to wade through to get to the heart of the matter, for one thing.

She shoved her hands into her pockets and inventoried what she had with her. She had enough material to adjust the phase of one of them -- of Nemesis, unfortunately. The fix relied on the particular expression of the X gene in Katherine -- "Call me Kitty" -- Pryde and Kavita had not X gene to modify the expression of.

"Hold still," she told Nemesis around the syringe between her teeth once she was done. She'd always had a good memory for gene sequences and DNA encoding.

She stabbed him with the needle. He tried to suppress the flinch and obscure it through bravado, but she knew she'd hurt him.

"Am I corporeal now?" he asked, pulling his sleeve back down. He had good muscle tone.

She waved a hand through his face. "Given that I can't slap you for doubting my work, yes, you are."

"I shall now science you back to the tangible realm," Nemesis said.

"You do that."

Kavita wondered where Jeffries had gone. At this time of the day, he should normally have come by the lab at least once. They had tea, whenever both their schedules would allow. They each made their own tea separately -- because Jeffries was a heathen and steeped the leaves instead of boiling them -- but they had tea together, in this forsaken land of coffee.

Was it tea time?

It felt like it was time for tea. With any luck, it wouldn't take too long for Nemesis to restore her and then she would be able to have tea.

"Petri Girl --"

"Will you please stop calling me that!" Kavita was so sick of that nickname. Of all the nicknames Nemesis had inflicted on her, it was the one she hated most; at least "gene monkey" pointed towards her expertise.

Nemesis looked at her for a long moment, with those blue eyes of his. "What shall I call you, then?"

"I'm a doctor; you could try using the title I earned," she told him, because of course His Nibs wasn't going to use her name.

"No," Nemesis said. "I'm a doctor too; it would be too confusing to the plebes."

He had better not be including her in that number, Kavita thought. "A doctor of what? Punching Nazis?"

"I have a PhD." Nemesis huffed and didn't answer her question.

"So do I," she said. "And an MD, so I'm more of a doctor than you are."

"Very well, Kavita. I shall refer to you by your title since you so desire." He sounded all of eight years old.

Wait.

"Did you just use my name?"

He sniffed and pulled down a lever. "I did no such thing, Doctor Gene Monkey."

She was going to _end him_.

Before she could enact her revenge, however, someone ran into her back and she had to take a couple of steps forward -- bringing her nose to nose with Nemesis -- to avoid falling on her face. Nemesis tried to catch her and she batted his hands away.

"Ow," Jeffries said from behind her.

"Watch where you're going, Wire Man," Nemesis told him.

"Oh, I'm sorry, was that your ego I just ran into?" Jeffries asked.

"Actually, that was me," Kavita said.

"K? Where are you?" Somewhat belatedly, he added, "Are you okay?"

"She's right there," Nemesis said, pointing at her and over her own reply of "I'm fine".

Nemesis turned to her. "Are you going to say anything?"

"You took me from intangible to invisible," Kavita said. "So much for self-evolved intellect."

"Please." Nemesis rolled his eyes at her. "If your slipshod gene therapy hadn't rewritten said intellect, this wouldn't be a problem. And how come he gets to call you nicknames and I don't?"

"Because," and here, Kavita pushed his finger out of her face out of habit and had to cover the movement up when it turned out he hadn't pointed a finger at her this time -- her glasses really needed readjusting, yes --, "he's my friend."

Jeffries looked bizarrely touched at that.

"So I'm not your friend," Nemesis said. It wasn't really a question.

"Why can you see her and I can't?" Jeffries asked. He waved a hand in front of his face, assembling some sort of scope. When he was done, he said, "Hi, K."

"We're still phase aligned. I think I generate some sort of localised trans-phasal field that modifies the string wave form of the photons..." She trailed off. Fixing this wouldn't be hard, really. It would just require Nemesis to do his job properly.

How odd that he hadn't done it right in the first place, though. Was he still pranking her?

He had better not be.

"Right," Jeffries said. "Shouldn't be too hard to fix, then. We did something similar for Kitty a while back."

He grabbed the lab materials from Nemesis -- he didn't need them, but you never left Nemesis with lab equipment if you could avoid it; that was a good way to suddenly find yourself two inches tall -- and tinkered with them briefly.

He pressed a button.

Kavita sneezed.

"Welcome back, K," Jeffries said as he took off his scope.

"Thank you. It's nice to know that someone," she said, looking pointedly at Nemesis, "knows how to do their job properly."

Nemesis huffed and stomped away.

"Think he'll be back for revenge?" Jeffries asked, rubbing the back of his head where the scope's strap had dug into his skull.

Kavita raised an eyebrow at him. Of course he would. He was _Nemesis_ and he'd chosen to call himself that, which kind of told you everything you needed to know.

The next day, Kavita was looking at comparative protein immunoblotting for subjects Pryde and Lehnsherr. She'd wanted to do this with every other mutant on the island as well, but she'd run out of alkaline phosphatase and the closet had been empty when she'd gone for a refill. She typed a note to Danger to order for more -- yes, they could make some, but who had the time?

"Turn around, bright eyes," Nemesis said.

Kavita turned around. What she wanted to say was 'Total Eclipse of the Heart, really?', but what came out were words by Elton John, "All this science I don't understand, it's just my job five days a week."

"I'm madly in anger with you," Nemesis said.

"Blame it on the lies that killed us. Blame it on the truth that ran us down," Kavita replied. Like it was her fault they were stuck addressing each other in song quotes?

Nemesis threw up his arms in despair.

Kavita took a step back. Nemesis had once hit someone in the face with his grandiose gestures.

Nemesis rolled his eyes at her.

She signed to him to stop being so dramatic and find a way to fix this. She signed again, using simpler signs, when he didn't react. Then she tried in International Sign instead of Calcutta Sign Language.

"There is no political solution to our troubled evolution," Kavita said, trying to convey that they needed to fix this soon. She was learning things about her musical tastes she would rather not have learned.

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime you just might find, you get what you need," Nemesis replied. He held up a board mocking her choice of song.

Kavita turned a monitor towards him and typed, **Total Eclipse of Heart, James?**

"I am a man of wealth and taste," Nemesis replied.

"All lies and jest, still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

They worked well into the night and communicated almost solely by emails and other text based methods.

In the morning, Kavita had to admit that even though she'd thought Nemesis had been responsible for this, her first instinct had been right; he wasn't the one doing this. Bonnie Tyler had hurt his dignity enough, but there was no way he would have willingly admitted to listening to One Direction.

Huh.

"Tell me what you find when you read my mind," Kavita said.

"You don't need a doctor, you need a vet," Nemesis said and turned back to his work.

"We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year." Kavita accompanied the quote with a drawing of a star, then shook her head and texted **The starfish is responsible**.

 **What makes you think that?** Nemesis asked the same way.

 **You've kept it, for one thing.** Kavita stopped typing for a moment, because her brain felt like it was turning into pure light. **Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.**

"Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!" Kavita added out loud, since writing was no longer safe from manipulation. It was annoying, but it did mean they were on the right track, though, and at least they’d moved on from songs to movies.

"This strange mixing of minds may be the greatest single service ever performed for humanity!" Nemesis said, because even being constrained to quoting movies wasn’t enough to rid him of his grandiloquence. "May the Force be with us."

Kavita coughed to disguise her laugh.

They kept working well into the night and morning the next day. Then Nemesis stood up and asked, "Here’s looking at you, kid?"

Kavita threw up her hands -- and again with the copying of mannerisms! She was blaming the starfish -- because there was no movie quote that would explain what was going on. She suspected it had something to do with the Blessing of Neptune Lida had bestowed on her before she died.

Nemesis proposed a solution. Well. He called it a solution, Kavita called it irresponsible -- brains were not hearts, stopping them so they would restart right was not an option. Not to mention that this situation had nothing in common with ventricular fibrillation. If anything, it shared traits with third-degree atrio-ventricular block.

But no, stopping their own brains, even using a closely timed sinus wave to restart them before brain damage set in was not an option Kavita was willing to consider, especially given the complete lack of shielding. Even discounting the risk of collateral damage -- because of course Nemesis couldn't see farther than his own self -- Director Frost would have his hide if he gave her another migraine like the one he'd given her when he'd detached the starfish from his head in the first place.

Kavita liked her relationship with Frost the way it was. They were not friends, but they were friendly and she was not going to let Nemesis jeopardise this relationship. He seemed to forget that being, as Namor kept calling her and people like her, "Homo Inferior" meant her situation in Utopia was somewhat more precarious than she would have liked.

She could not fault any of them for this -- least of all Erik; she'd seen the numbers on the inside of his arm and she knew what they meant.

Still. It was not a position she liked drawing attention to and she was going to punch Nemesis if he didn't come up with a better plan.

He kept trying to explain his plan with quotes and diagrams -- the diagrams being thankfully unaffected, except for the labels. If Kavita never again saw another Pinky and the Brain quote, it would be too soon. "Your guest of honour – the Brain!" for the pre-frontal cortex? Really? The starfish had a terrible sense of humour -- presumably it'd gotten it from Nemesis.

Although, the starfish didn't have a pre-frontal cortex. It didn't have a brain as it was commonly understood, either. Not even a limbic cortex -- its heart and vital functions had a nervous system separate from the one that dealt with its cognitive functions, such as they were.

Ha!

They could stop the starfish's brain and hope it left them alone when it restarted. It wouldn't die if they only shut down its cognitive functions and would in fact restart itself -- that was what that cerebro-sinusoidal nerve node was there for, after all. A brain jump-starter wasn't something that had a lot of uses in nature, even with the recent increase in EMPs. Kavita wondered if it was something specific to this species of deep-sea starfish or if it had been brought on by the Terrigen spill.

She signed her plan to Nemesis and, thankfully, Danger was there to translate. She'd arrived moments ago, after Kavita had tapped out a message in Morse code with the panic button -- they were going to need to change it.

Nemesis nodded in approval and grabbed the starfish with his bare hands. _Ew slimy oh shit shit shit telepathy I hate it Kavita's pretty even when she frowns OH NO_

Kavita had most definitely not missed Nemesis' inner monologue being broadcasted to -- what was it again? Ah, yes -- the unworthy universe.

Nemesis dropped the starfish. "It's still telepathic."

"Congratulations, Moreau," Kavita said. There was only so far one could get into studying Genetics without encountering _The Island of Doctor Moreau_. For Kavita, that so far had been three days.

They both looked at each other, then down at the starfish on the floor.

"Didn't know you spoke German," Nemesis said. He sounded offended.

"I don't and I don't suppose you speak Bengali either?" Kavita asked.

Nemesis shook his head. "I would if I ever bothered to --"

"Save it," Kavita said. There was a good chance she wouldn't like him if he finished that sentence.

Nemesis closed his mouth.

Kavita considered asking if he'd been responsible for the synaesthesia, but decided not to. It didn't matter either way and she would not apologise until he did.

"Let's try again," Nemesis said. He spun the wave inducer in his hand and held it out to Danger, handle first. "I've changed the settings so it'll stop affecting us when it restarts. Do NOT activate it until both I and Doctor Genome are holding it. Do you understand, metal mind?"

"Yes," Danger said.

Kavita put her hand above the starfish. "On three. One."

"Two." Nemesis put his hand next to hers.

"Three." Their hands came down together.

_I love you._

James' eyes were as wide as hers felt.

_Which one of us said that?_

Then Danger rebooted the starfish and there was no way of knowing who had thought what.

**Author's Note:**

> Sonic Hedgehog is a real gene and robotnikinin is indeed a potential inhibitor, but I would advise against image-searching the former.
> 
> The songs quoted are, in order:  
> \- Total Eclipse of the Heart, by Bonnie Tyler  
> \- Rocket Man, by Elton John  
> \- St Anger, by Metallica  
> \- Backstreets, by Bruce Springsteen  
> \- Spirits In The Material World, by The Police  
> \- You Can't Always Get What You Want, by The Rolling Stones  
> \- Sympathy for the Devil, by The Rolling Stones  
> \- The Boxer, by Simon and Garfunkel  
> \- Read my Mind, by The Killers  
> \- Love On A Tightrope, by Queen  
> \- Wish You Were Here, by Pink Floyd
> 
> The movies quoted are, in order:  
> \- Monthy Python and the Holy Grail (1975)  
> \- The Jazz Singer (1927)  
> \- Batman (1966)  
> \- Return of the Jedi (1983)  
> \- Casablanca (1942)
> 
> Life of Brian (1979) is also referenced in an earlier scene.


End file.
